The professor, after seeing that all danger of injury to the mirror's exposed parts was over, walked nervously up and down the rooms. He would have to carry his plan through with force of arms, with sheer impertinence and energy of purpose. It was an interference in two lives that he had in view. Had he any right to that? But was he not, after all, to blame for the fact of the curious transfusion of soul that had left one man a mental wreck, and stimulated the other's forces to a course of life out of all character with the strivings of his real soul? If he had not tempted Orson Vane to these experiments, Arthur Wantage would never be drooping in the shadow of collapse, and in danger of losing his proper place in the roll of prosperity. Vanlief shuddered at thought of what an unscrupulous man might not do with this discovery of his; what lives might be ruined, what successes built on fraud and theft? Fraud and theft? Those words were foul enough in the material things of life; but how much more horrid would they be when they covered the spiritual realm. To steal a purse, in the old dramatic phrase, was a petty thing; but to steal a soul--Professor Vanlief found himself launched into a whirlpool of doubt and confusion. He had opened a new, vast region of mental science. He had enabled one man to pass the wall with which nature had hedged the unforeseen forces of humanity. Was he to learn that, in opening this new avenue of psychic activity, he had gone counter to the eternal Scheme of Things, and let in no divine light, but rather the fierce glare of diabolism? His thoughts traversed argument upon argument while Nevins completed his work. He heard the man's voice, finally, with an actual relief, a gladness at being recalled to the daring and doing that lay before him. When the Professor was gone, a wagon bearing away the precious mirror, Nevins poured himself out a notably stiff glass of Five-Star. "Here's hoping," he toasted the silent room, "the silly thing gets smashed into everlasting smithereens!" And he drowned any fears he might have had to the contrary. This particular species of time-killing was now a daily matter with Nevins; the incessant strain upon his nerves of some months past had finally brought him to the pitch where he had only one haven of refuge left.